29-

JESUS’ UNCANNY ’FAMILY SCENE’

George Aichele
Department of Philosophy and Religion
Adrian College, Adrian, MI, 49221

The trace [writing] is the erasure of selfhood, of one’s own presence, and
is constituted by the threat or anguish of its irremediable disappearance,
of the disappearance of its disappearance. An unerasable trace is not a
trace, it is a full presence, an immobile and uncorruptible substance, a
son of God, a sign of parousia and not a seed, that is, a mortal germ

(Derrida 1978: 230).

Mnr-k’s Fantasy of Jesus

In the transformations worked by the Gospels of Matthew and Luke on
the stories in the Gospel of Mark we can see ideological pressures to
make the ambiguous Jesus of Mark into something better suited to reli-
gious belief. Mark’s written trace produces a world and a character that
make belief difficult, thereby awakening the ’threat or anguish of its
irremediable disappearance’. The rewritings of Mark by Matthew and
Luke shift the story away from this narrative world, with its ambiguous
central character. This narrative turning is a shift away from something
in the Gospel of Mark that may have been unacceptable to the writers
and the early readers of Matthew and Luke-in other words, something
that was unacceptable to Christian faith as it emerged during its first
several centuries.
The Gospels of Matthew and Luke are also written texts, of course.
Nevertheless, both of these Gospels seek to replace Mark’s anguish-
forming trace with what Jacques Derrida calls an ’unerasable trace’.
The narrative shift in both Matthew and Luke is always in the direction
of a genre that refers to the supernatural-a genre that represents a
30

supernatural world as though it were actual, that is, realistically. The

realism of Matthew and Luke is a supernatural realism, rather than the
naturalistic realism with which readers today are more familiar. ’We
adapt our judgement to the imaginary reality ... and regard souls, spirits
and ghosts as though their existence had the same validity as our own
has in material reality’ (Freud 1955: 250). Tzvetan Todorov calls this
genre of supernatural realism ’the marvelous’. The sorts of beings and
events that are represented in a narrative of the marvelous are quite
different from those in the types of realistic narrative for which the
primary world is the only world that exists, but they are equally ’real’,
within the limits of that genre. In the stories of Matthew and of Luke,
God is explicitly at work in the words and deeds of Jesus.
The Gospels of Matthew and Luke narrate versions of Mark’s stories
that refer unambiguously to the supernatural, but the Gospel of Mark
does not. In doing this, both Matthew and Luke turn away from a
narrative in which a significant role is played by what Todorov calls
’the fantastic’ .’ The fantastic is a writing in which extra-textual refer-
ence is short-circuited and interrupted, and the inherent fictionality of

the written text becomes apparent. As a result, in the fantastic text the
erasability of the trace becomes apparent, perhaps even unavoidable.
Matthew and Luke both de-fantasize the ambiguous and referentially
disruptive elements in Mark’s text, and thus they both conceal or
disguise the erasability of the trace, each of them in its own way. In
these Gospels, the element of the fantastic is eliminated from Mark’s
story.
This shift in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke from the fantastic to
the marvelous is an ideological one. By rewriting Mark as they do,
Matthew and Luke in effect make Mark ’canonical’. It is finally the
New Testament canon itself that counters the ’threat or anguish’ pro-
voked by the Markan text’s referential uncertainties, and that replaces
these uncertainties with ’an immobile and uncorruptible substance’, the
’Word of God’. By bracketing the text of Mark as they do in the
canonical list of the New Testament, Matthew and Luke offer a set of
filters through which Mark can be read and ’properly’ interpreted. As a
result, the play of the fantastic in the Gospel of Mark can be overlooked
by Mark’s readers, who are often eager to rewrite Mark into something
more like Matthew or Luke-that is, something more clearly ’Chris-

1. On the relation between the fantastic and the marvelous, see Todorov (1973:
41-57). Some difficulties in reading Mark are explored at length in Aichele (1996).
 31

tian’. This is another way to describe the ideological, metatextual pres-

sure that inclusion in the biblical canon places upon the Gospel of
Mark-the pressure to tame Mark’s ’wild connotations’ (de Man 1979:
208).
Mark continually resists and subverts this pressure. Much as in post-
modern ’metafictional’ narratives such as Franz Kafka’s story, ’The
Metamorphosis’, Mark narrates the difficulty of its own reading. It does
this explicitly in statements such as ’let him who reads this take note of
it’ (Mk 13.14) ;2 in this as well as other places, the text announces its
own written-ness. In other cases, Mark’s resistance to the reader’s

desire for an ’unerasable trace’ is more subtle. One such case is the
double story that appears in Mk 3.20-35. The narrative of Jesus’ family
scene in Mark 3 is superficially quite different from that of Gregor
Samsa in Kafka’s story.~ The ambiguities of Jesus’ identity in Mark are
not as evident as those of Gregor, the young traveling salesman who is

mysteriously transformed into a gigantic insect, but they are no less

bizarre. Both stories draw upon similar structures of uncertainty-fan-
tastic structures of the uncanny. In both stories the fantastic serves to
disrupt the identity of the central character and finally to render that
identity impossible to determine.

Mark’s Family Scene

Then [Jesus] went into a house; and the crowd gathered again, so that
they could not even eat their bread. When his own people heard of this,
they went forth to get control of him, for they said that he was out of his
mind. And the scribes who had come down from Jerusalem said that
Beelzebub had hold of him, and that it was through the prince of the
demons that he drove out demons. He called them to him and said to
them through parables: How can Satan drive out Satan? And if a
kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. And if a
house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand. And if
Satan rises up against himself and is divided, he cannot stand but comes
to an end. But no one can go into the house of the strong man and seize
his goods, unless first he binds the strong man; then he can plunder his
house. Truly I tell you, all shall be forgiven the sons of men, their sins

2. Except as noted, translations from the Gospel of Mark in the following are

from Lattimore(1979).
3. For further discussion of ’The Metamorphosis’ as an uncanny narrative, see

Aichele (1997a).
32

and such blasphemies as they may speak; but if one blasphemes against
the Holy Spirit, he shall have no forgiveness ever, but shall be guilty of
everlasting sin. This was because they said he had an unclean spirit.
Then his mother and his brothers came and stood outside and sent one in
to summon him. The crowd was seated around him, and they said to him:
See, your mother and your brothers are outside looking for you. He
answered and said to them: Who is my mother and who are my brothers?
And looking about at those who were sitting in a circle around him, he
said: Here is my mother, here are my brothers; whoever does the will of
God is my brother and sister and mother (3.20-35).

As often happens in the Gospel of Mark, one story is intercalated

with, or interrupted by, another story, with which it appears to have
some relationship of meaning. In this case it is the story of Jesus’

family seeking to take control of him because they think he is mad, on

the one hand, and the story of ’scribes... from Jerusalem’ accusing
Jesus of being possessed by the devil, on the other. In the early
centuries of the common era, insanity was commonly thought of as
demon-possession. Nevertheless, by distinguishing these two stories
even as it interweaves them, the Gospel of Mark requires that a dis-

tinction be made between these two claims. In effect, Mark presents

two alternative ways in which its own text can be read. Each of the two
character groups presents a reading of the character of Jesus-a decod-
ing of his narrative identity-that seeks to bring Jesus’s story to an end.
Both of these readings raise the question, but in different ways, of who
possesses Jesus. To each of these versions of the question Jesus gives a
somewhat different answer. By juxtaposing these alternative readings,
and by failing to ’choose’ between them, the text makes explicit its own
written-ness, and the problem of its own meaning. Variations on these
two readings of Jesus’ identity also appear in parallel accounts in the
Gospels of Matthew and Luke, where, however, they are kept separate
from each other. The problem of their juxtaposition disappears. The
narrative context of each story is quite different in Mark than it is in
either Matthew or Luke.
The ambiguity produced by the intercalation of stories is also evident
at other levels of the narrative structure. The English phrase, ’his own
people’, in Richmond Lattimore’s translation of Mark’s story translates
the Greek phrase, hoi /?<7/’’ autou (word by word: those [from] beside
him). Hoi par’ autou come ’to get control of [Jesus], for they said that
he was out of his mind’ (Mk 3.21). The RSV translates hoi par’ autou as
’his family’ who have come to ’seize him’ because he is ’beside
 33

himself’. Apparently his family thinks that Jesus has lost his sanity, and
they intend to take possession of him. Perhaps they even intend to bind
him, as the Gerasene demoniac in Mk 5.3-4 has been bound. Both
Matthew and Luke omit the troublesome sentence at Mk 3.21 from their
versions of the story.4 But whether hoi par-’ autou simply equals ’his
family’ is problematic. Sherman Johnson questions whether Mk 3.21
belongs with 3.31-35-that is, whether hoi par-’ autou refers to Jesus’
family or to some other group such as the disciples or even the scribes
(1960: 80; cf. Taylor 1953: 235-36). If we assume that the phrase hoi
pao’ alltoll does refer to Jesus’ family, the scribes then interrupt this
story with charges that Jesus is possessed by Beelzebub, and the family
scene is put on hold for the next nine verses while the story of the

’possession’ of Jesus takes a more explicitly supernatural turn. After

Jesus has responded to the scribes, the encounter with his family
resumes with ’then his mother and his brothers came and stood outside’

the house-a house in which Jesus is crowded about by so many people

that they cannot even eat.
In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus often presents important teachings to
the twelve and other close followers in a space such as a house or boat,
or on a mountain, where they are separated from the crowd and others

’who are outside’, tois eao (Mk 4.11). The privileged recipients of these
teachings are therefore ’insiders’. Mark 4.10 includes hoi per-i accton,
’those who were about him’ (RSV), along with the twelve as those who
were privy, ’when they were alone’, to Jesus’ explanation of the para-

bles, and thus to ’the secrets of the Kingdom of God’ (Mk 4.11).
Whether or not the phrase Izoi /?<7/’’ autoll (3.21 ) refers to Jesus’ family,
might the sense of this phrase nonetheless be the same as hoi peri auto
(4.10)-can para, ’from beside’ (with the genitive), be synonymous
with peri, ’about’? If it can, then in Mk 3.19-35, it is the ’outsiders’
according to Mark 4-that is, the crowd-who are inside the house
with Jesus. Perhaps this group even includes the scribes with whom he
disputes; we are not told that he left the house in order to speak with the
scribes. In striking contrast, those who appear as insiders in Mark 4 are
already treated as outsiders in Mark 3. ’His own people/his mother and
his brothers’, whom one might otherwise expect to be insiders, are
outside of (exo) the house. And yet it is they who charge Jesus with
being ’outside himself’ (ex-esti, 3.21 )!
4. See however Jn 7.20, 8.48, 52 and 10.20-21, the last of which conjoins
’fiend’ and being crazy.
being possessed by a
34

The outsiders accuse the insider of being outside. However, in the

Gospel of Mark Jesus does end up on the outside. His dying words are
’My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ (15.34). This is,
among other things, a cry of profound estrangement. He dies, crucified
in ’the Place of the Skull’, among robbers (15.22, 27). Compare the
climax of the vineyard parable in Mk 12.1-9, which is often read as an
allegory of Jesus’ death: ’And they took him and killed him, and threw
him out (e.vebaloii ... ex6) of the vineyard’. How much further outside
can one get?

Fantasy and the Uncanny5

References to the family and to ’the house’ appear repeatedly in this
story in the Gospel of Mark. The story begins when Jesus enters a
house, a very crowded house. The talk turns to houses divided against
themselves, houses of strong men broken into. These houses are places
of violence, places of identity and of the disruption of identity. ’His
own people’ may also be translated as ’his family’, and Jesus’ mother
and brothers are explicitly mentioned near the end of the story. Perhaps
they have come to bring Jesus home. Who are Jesus’ mother and
brothers (and sisters)? Later in Mark we are given some names: Mary,
James, Joseph, Judas and Simon (6.3). The answer that Jesus gives,
however, is that his mother and sister and brother are the people in the
circle around him (tous per-i auton, 3.34). Jesus claims as his family the
people who are ’here’ in the house with him, people whom he further
identifies as ’whoever does the will of God’ (3.35). But Jesus’ family is
outside of the house.
Jesus’ ’family scene’ in Mark 3 is an uncanny scene, in the sense that
Todorov uses the word ’uncanny’. The uncanny turns the family dwell-
ing, the home or house, inside-out by writing it.’The metaphysical
enclosure, the consistency of reality that provides a sense of totality and
identity, is disrupted and fractured. The uncanny arises as a hetero-
geneity, an otherness, that is both intimate (German heimlich) and
secret or hidden (heimlich, yet also unheimlich [Freud 1955: 222-24]).
Julia Kristeva calls this a nondisjunction, a failure of binary opposition.
For Todorov, the uncanny is a narrative genre that features odd or

5. Portions of the following two sections appear, in different form, in Aichele

(1997a).
6. See Bachelard 1964: 3-73.
 35

bizarre events happening in the everyday world-the ordinary world of

consensus reality. Sigmund Freud says of the uncanny that ’[the writer]
can even increase his effect and multiply it far beyond what could hap-

pen in reality, by bringing about events which never or very rarely hap-
pen in fact’ (1955: 250). Nevertheless, according to Todorov, uncanny
events can be explained in purely natural terms.
Todorov thus defines the uncanny and the marvelous as two distinct
genres of literature. Like the marvelous, the uncanny is a realistic genre,
but unlike the marvelous, the uncanny refers to the non-supernatural
world of everyday experience. Both the uncanny and the marvelous
refer to reality, and therefore both the uncanny and the marvelous
require belief, in the sense of assent to a series of propositions about
reality, that is, metaphysical propositions. Nevertheless, each of these
literary genres implies a distinctive metaphysics, which corresponds to
its distinctive representation of the real world. In effect, they refer to
very different ’genres’ of reality.
Todorov argues that the fantastic arises when the reader-‘no actual
reader, but the role of the reader implicit in the text’-is unable to
determine whether a narrative phenomenon belongs to the genre of the
marvelous or to the genre of the uncanny (1973: 31-33; see also
Todorov 1977: 179-89). In other words, the implicit reader does not
know whether or not the supernatural is ’real’ in the world of the story.
This indecision takes the form of ’hesitation’ on the part of the reader, a
hesitation that cannot be sustained for long by any actual reader,
despite the implicit reader’s condition-that is, despite the narrative
structure.
The hesitation of the implicit reader between the marvelous and the
uncanny results from an inability to decide what is real. The fantastic
appears as a fundamental ambiguity of genre that must be resolved
through the actual reader’s beliefs. Because both the uncanny and the
marvelous refer to reality, both of these genres play on the reader’s
beliefs. The readers of fictional narratives engage in the ’willing sus-
pension of disbelief’, but this suspension involves belief. In order to
suspend disbelief, I must already have a contrary belief. In contrast, the
fantastic narrative permits only ‘nearly ... believing’ (Todorov 1973: 31,
quoting the Sarngossn Manuscript). Nearly believing is neither belief
nor disbelief; hence the fantastic story involves a sort of ideological

suspension-a suspension of belief, not disbelief.

Considered apart from the larger story of the Gospel of Mark, the
36

story in Mk 3.20-35 appears to be uncanny because Jesus’ response to

’his own people’ (and also to the scribes, as I will argue below) is
extraordinary, to be sure, but it is not marvelous. No supernatural events
occur, and no supernatural entities appear. However, many people read
the larger story of Mark (perhaps under the influence of Matthew or
Luke) as though it were obviously a story about a supernatural being,
namely, Jesus the Son of God. If Jesus is truly the divine Son of God in
the rest of the Gospel of Mark, then even this apparently non-super-
natural story is a marvelous one, and not uncanny. Those who read Mk
3.20-35 as belonging to the genre of the marvelous respond to Mark’s
writing by seeking to read its eminently erasable trace as though it were
an unerasable trace: ’a full presence... a son of God, a sign of parousia’

(Den-ida 1978: 230).

Nevertheless, the larger story of Mark does not provide sufficient
narrative cues to support this marvelous reading. The identity of Jesus
as ’son of man’ or ’son of God’ (messiah) remains at best confused.

Whether his miracles are truly supernatural is uncertain. The referent of

his parables, ’the kingdom of God’, and his relation to it, and the thrust
of his dialogues with both opponents and followers, are polyvalent at
best. The anonymous voice from the sky that speaks at Jesus’ baptism
and at the transfiguration, the narrator’s comment at Mk 1.1 and the
words of the young man in the tomb at the end of Mark-none of these
7
pronouncements resolves the uncertainty of who Jesus is. ~
The story of Jesus’ family scene in Mark 3 is also uncanny in the
sense used by Freud in his famous essay, ’The &dquo;Uncanny&dquo;’ (1955, orig-

inal 1919). It is unfortunate that Todorov uses the word ’uncanny’ to

refer to a literary genre, while Freud uses the same word to refer to a
psychological phenomenon. The two ’uncannies’ are not identical, but
they are related. Freud was not particularly concerned with literary
theory, but complex relationships between literature and lived experi-
ence appear throughout ’The &dquo;Uncanny&dquo;’, much of which is devoted to

a discussion of E.T.A. Hoffman’s story, ’The Sand-Man’. Freud notes,

and seems uncomfortable with, the complex relation between the liter-
ary uncanny and the psychological uncanny:’

7. See, for example, Aichele ( 1996, 1997b, 1998) for further discussion of
these points.
8. See Lydenberg ( 1997) for valuable discussion and further bibliography on
this point.
 37

[W]e should differentiate between the uncanny that we actually experi-

ence and the uncanny that we merely picture or read about.

[A] great deal that is not uncanny in fiction would be so if it happened in

real life; and ... there are many more means of creating uncanny effects in
fiction than there are in real life (1955: 247, 249).

For Freud, the uncanny appears as a moment when misunderstanding

comes tolight-not in order to be resolved and dissipated (id becoming

ego), but rather to be revealed as an ineradicable symptom and disrup-
tion of the family scene. Freud’s uncanny appears whenever the famil-
iar becomes unfamiliar and the comfortable becomes frightening (1955:
220): what we thought we knew well, we find that we did not know at
all. Although Derrida does not specifically refer, in his essay on Freud,
to the uncanny, nevertheless the ’scene of writing’ described by Derrida
is profoundly uncanny. The ontological priority of ’difference’ (writing,
language) disrupts self-identity and fragments the totality of self-pres-
ence (speech, consciousness). Writing is that ’trace’, mentioned in the

epigraph to this article, which ’is the erasure of selfhood’ and of ’pres-
ence’. According to Derrida, the priority of difference appears in
Freud’s own work in metaphors of writing, and especially in Freud’s
description of consciousness as the ’Mystic Writing Pad’. ’[W]hat is a
text, and what must the psyche be if it can be represented as a text?’
(Derrida 1978: 199). Derrida argues that Freud understands the mind as
a psychic ’writing machine’. To interpret or translate this mental writ-

ing (for example, by way of dreams) involves a kind of reading

(Derrida 1978: 218).
In the family scene in Mark 3, ’writing’ appears overtly in the form
of the scribes (Greek grnmmateis, that is, writers, experts on the ’scrip-
tures’, or writings) from Jerusalem who dispute with Jesus. More
importantly (and more subtly) writing also appears in the difference
which is not a difference, the alternative ’readings’ of Jesus that pro-
duce the uncanny alphabetic duplication between hoi par’_autou and
hoi (or tOllS) peri auton. Repetition or the double (the mirror image)
plays a large role in Freud’s notion of the uncanny (1955: 234-36). As
Derrida notes, repetition also figures strongly in Freud’s understanding
of memory as a trace or writing on the brain (Derrida 1978: 200-202):
’like all who know how to write, he let the scene duplicate, repeat, and
betray itself within the scene’ (p. 229). Although Derrida is speaking
here of Freud, his comment applies equally well to the Gospel of Mark.
Mark’s family scene is filled not only with alphabetic but also with
38

scenic doublings: the house in which Jesus speaks and the house(s) of
which he speaks, Jesus and the strong man, Jesus’ family and the
crowd, his family/followers and the scribes.
Todorov’s ’fantastic’ appears in the hesitation between the literary
genres of the marvelous and the uncanny, but Todorov’s fantastic is
also very close to Freud’s ’uncanny’. ’The rational schema represents
the human being as a subject entering into relations with other persons
or with things that remain external to him, and which have the status of

objects. The literature of the fantastic disturbs this abrupt separation’

(Todorov 1973: 116). The similarity to Freud’s concept is heightened
further by Todorov’s claim that the fantastic stands at a point of inde-
cision between poetry and allegory. On the one hand, poetry tends in
the direction of what Kristeva calls the semiotic, the space in which
language appears. Questions of meaning or reference are less important
in poetry than the pure play of language with itself.

[P]oetic images are not descriptive... [T]hey are to be read quite

literally, onthe level of the verbal chain they constitute, not even on that
of their reference. The poetic image is a combination of words, not of
things, and it is pointless, even harmful, to translate this combination
into sensory terms (Todorov 1973: 60).

Language is a physical thing, involving space and matter. This is the

realm of the signifier. The physical aspect of language-what Todorov
calls the ‘literal’-is especially evident in written language. The spa-
tiality and materiality of language also figure in Derrida’s comments on
Freud: ’The route is opened in nature or matter, forest or wood (hyle),
and in it acquires a reversibility of time and space. We should have to
study together, genetically and structurally, the history of the road and
the history of writing’ (1978: 214).‘’
On the other hand, allegory tends in the direction of what Kristeva
calls the symbolic, the ’monotheistic’ univocality of coherent meaning.
In allegory, content or message-the non-literal or ’spiritual’ dimension
of language-dominates the linguistic medium. ’[A]n isolated metaphor
indicates only a figurative manner of speaking; but if the metaphor is
sustained, it reveals an intention to speak of something else besides the
first object of the utterance’ (Todorov 1973: 62-63). Todorov claims
that the fantastic is fictional, as opposed to poetic, and literal, as

9. On the hyletic aspects of language, see also Kristeva (1984) and Aichele
(1996). This modem use of the Greek word hyl&ecirc; derives from Husserl (1962).
 39

opposed to allegorical. Poetic language is essentially non-referential,

and allegorical language refers to extratextual truth. In its fundamental
undecidability, fantasy is both anti-mimetic and anti-metaphysical.
If the implicit reader did not seek or expect some sort of reference or
meaning, there could be no hesitation between the marvelous and the
uncanny; but if this meaning is found in some hidden or indirect refer-
ence, then the hesitation disappears. Therefore there are two undecid-
abilities : one at the level of reference (the signified) and another related
one at the level of the text itself (the signifier). In the fantastic, the

materiality of language (the semiotic) and its power of signification (the

symbolic) are at war with one another. The fantastic hesitation between
the uncanny and the marvelous occurs because the physical medium
can receive at once two opposed meanings. Language itself disrupts the

possibility of coherent meaning. But this happens because the written

trace is itself fantastic: the material base of language (the semiotic)

appears in and through the fragmentation of linguistic meaning (the

symbolic), for meaning is always either heimlich or unheimlich, prop-
erly binary and univocal.
According to Todorov, the fantastic moment cannot be sustained; it
can survive only as long as generic indeterminacy does. Literary fan-
tasy must destroy itself, for the (actual) reader cannot remain in a state
of near belief. Freud agrees, but for different reasons: ’the writer creates
a kind of uncertainty in us in the beginning by not letting us know, no

doubt purposely, whether he is taking us into the real world or into a

purely fantastic one of his own creation’ (1955: 230; see also 251). He
goes on to say that by the end of the story the reader does know
whether the story’s world is ’real’ (Todorov’s uncanny) or ’purely
fantastic’ (Todorov’s marvelous). Freud locates this necessary revela-
tion in the story itself, in the intention of the author. Derrida counters,
in our epigraph, that writing is the trace that erases selthood: it is the
approach of ’irremediable disappearance’. It is not the author who
determines the meaning of any story. At the moment of hesitation,
inter- and extratextual forces alike press the reader (as Todorov sug-
gests) to move on to a deciding of the undecidable, and the reader
rewrites the story by reading it as either uncanny or as marvelous.
In dealing with ancient written texts any assumption of an author’s
intention is problematic at best. There is no revelation of the story’s
40

referent in the Gospel of Mark,&dquo;’ and it is because of this apparent

deficiency that the Gospels of Matthew and Luke both rewrite Mark.
They write as readers of Mark, filled with anguish by the disappearance
of disappearance: the erasable trace.

Who Possesses Jesus?

Like Kafka’s story, ’The Metamorphosis’, the family scene in Mark 3
also follows an ’oneiric logic’ (Todorov 1973: 173). It is a fantastic
scene-or an uncanny one, as Freud uses that term-with Jesus on the

inside of both the house and the crowd (the unheimlich has become
heimlich) and his family on the outside of both the house and the crowd
(the heimlich has become unheimlich).11 This scene curiously prefigures
the paradox that is to be established in Mk 4.10-13 and elsewhere,
namely, that insiders such as the disciples continuously fail to under-
stand Jesus’ teachings, but outsiders (such as the Syrophoenician
woman in Mk 7 or the scribe in Mk 12) do understand him.
The reversal of inside and outside in this story in Mark 3 is explicitly
enacted in the final verses of the episode (Mk 3.32-35). Jesus asks,
’Who is my mother and who are my brothers?’ Then he looks at those
who are ’around him’ (tous peri nuton) and says, ’Here is my mother,
here are my brothers’ . Those who are ’around him’ in the house are
contrasted with ’his own people’; now peri auto does stand over
against par’ autou. Jesus breaks open the possessive, heimlich space of
the family and redefines it to include the unheimlich crowd sitting in a
circle around him. At the same time, this crowd in their intimacy with
Jesus displaces in advance the disciples in Mark 4, who despite their
insider status will never understand Jesus in the Gospel of Mark. The
crowd of which Jesus speaks is composed of ’whoever does the will of
God’; it is a crowd who despite their outsider status is on the inside.
However, despite this story and Jesus’s words, it is a crowd that does
not appear, ever, in the Gospel of Mark. It is a fabulous, non-real
crowd.
Jesus rejects his family’s attempt to possess him by claiming a much

10. The traditional, and inadequate, commentators’ response to Mark’s failure

to clarify itself is the ’messianic secret’. On this see Aichele (1996, 1997b).
11. A more purely psychoanalytic approach to this story might identify this
moment with the repressed infantile anxiety that Freud claims underlies the feeling
of the uncanny (1955: 245-49).
 41

more extended but also much more indeterminate ’family’ for himself.
Jesus’ identity as ’the son of Mary and the brother of James and Joseph
and Judas and Simon’ (Mk 6.3) 12 is replaced by that of the brother or
son to whomever does God’s will. Is there here perhaps even a kind of

political-familial solidarity with the ’sons of men’ of Mk 3.28? Is Jesus

just another ’son of man’, another blasphemer? He is himself eventually
accused and convicted of blasphemy (14.64; see also 2.7). This would
imply that the crowd has possessed Jesus, instead of ’his own people’.
A similar displacement of the family appears in other sayings of Jesus
in the Gospel of Mark:
no is rejected except in his own country, and among his
prophet own

kinsmen, and in his own house (emphasis added, 6.4).

there is no one who has given up house or brothers or sisters or mother

or father or children or lands for the sake of me and the gospel who will

not receive a hundredfold [now in this time, houses and brothers and
sisters and mothers and children and lands, with persecutions] (10.29-
30).
brother will betray brother to death, and the father his child, and children
will rise up against their parents and work their death (13.12-13).
Mark’s Jesus is no supporter of ’family values’!
Jesus’ uncanny displacement of his family identity in the confronta-
tion with ’his own people’ is echoed in his dispute with the scribes from
Jerusalem that interrupts the family scene in Mark 3. Instead of seeking
to possess Jesus, as his family does, the scribes accuse him of being
already possessed by ’the prince of the demons’. Jesus summons the
scribes as though they were his disciples-yet another displacement of
the insiders-and he replies to their charge with a series of parabolic
questions and statements about Satan, a kingdom, or a house divided
against himself or itself.
Both Mt. 12.27-28 and Lk. 11.19-20 eliminate these ’parables’ by
adding Jesus’ explicit statement that he drives out the demons by the
spirit (or ’finger’ in Luke) of God. In fact, Matthew and Luke even
eliminate the word ’parables’ (parabolai) from their versions of the
story. Furthermore, the narrative additions of Matthew and Luke pro-
vide non-paradoxical alternatives to the scribes’ claim and reinforce the
common interpretation that the ’strong man’ of the saying is the devil

12. Note also the reference to Jesus’s (unnamed) sisters in Mk 6.3. The sisters
also appear in several ancient manuscripts at Mk 3.32.
42

and that the spirit possessing Jesus is divine. Matthew’s parallel to

Mark’s account of the confrontation with the scribes is inserted into a
longer, tightly organized story in which the good, miraculous powers of
Jesus as the son of David are highlighted. Both Matthew and Luke
present Jesus as able to read the minds of his opponents. Although the
narrative strategies in Matthew and Luke are different, the signified
effect is the same: to remove the indeterminacies that appear in Mark,
that is, to create an unerasable trace. These transformations reflect the
desire for ’a full presence... a sign of parousia’ noted by Derrida in his
essay on Freud.
In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus’ paradoxical questions and statements
are followed immediately by the saying, ’no one can go into the house

of the strong man and seize his goods, unless first he binds the strong
man; then he can plunder his house’ (Mk 3.27). Who is the strong man,
and who is the thief? And perhaps we should add: Who is already in the
house, in Mark’s story, and who is seeking to enter it? The use of both
’Beelzebub’ and ’Satan’ in this passage further confuses things. Vincent
Taylor regards Beelzebul (as the name appears in the oldest manu-
scripts)’ ~ as distinct from Satan (1953: 238). D.E. Nineham notes that
the phrase ’the strong one’ ’may have been a very primitive messianic
title for Jesus’, possibly referring to Isa. 49.24-25 or 53.12 (1963: 120,
note; see also Taylor 1953: 241). In Mk 1.7, John the Baptist announces
that ’he who is stronger than I is coming after me’. Luke revises the
’strong man’ saying (Lk. 11.21-22): instead of binding the strong man,
the thief (who is ‘stronger’ ) takes away ’the armor in which he had
trusted’. Despite the assumptions of various commentators, however,
Mark does not state that the robber is stronger than the ’strong man’.
The one who robs the strong man is often identified with Jesus. Is he
Jesus’ double? If so, then Jesus answers the scribes’ accusation by
describing himself as one who robs (diarpasei) another. 14 The uncer-
tainty of these identifications, and especially the violence implicit in the
saying about the strong man, is often overlooked by commentators. The
association of Jesus with both a robber and a strong man is echoed later
on in Mk 14.43-50, where Jesus is arrested and bound (as the strong
man is bound?) by a crowd, ’with swords and clubs’, ’as if I were a

13. The name ’Beelzebul’ appears in almost all of the oldest Greek manuscripts
and means ’lord of the house’ (Nineham 1963: 124). ’Beelzebub’ derives from the
Latin and Syriac translations.
14. See Aichele (1998).
 43

highwayman’ (lëstën). On this occasion, Jesus is violently defended by

one of his followers who has a sword (14.47). Another, perhaps even
clearer, echo of this association appears in Mark 15, where Jesus is
executed by the Romans in place of Barabbas, ’who had done murder
during the uprising’ (15.7). Barabbas is also a double of Jesus: his
strange name means ’son of the father’, and according to one ancient
tradition his name was also Jesus.’ The text of Mark uses the verb de5,
’to bind’, that appears in the strong man saying to describe both
Barabbas bound in prison (Mk 15.7) and Jesus bound before Pilate
(15.1). The violent content of Jesus’ saying about binding the strong
man approaches that of Saying 98 of the Gospel of Thomas:

Jesus said, ’The Kingdom of the Father is like a certain man who wanted
to kill a powerful man. In his own house he drew his sword and stuck it
into the wall in order to find out whether his hand could carry through.
Then he slew the powerful man’ (Cameron 1982: 35).

The assassin, also, is ’in his own house’. These statements suggest a
possibility of physical violence and also perhaps revolutionary political
activity on the part of Jesus and his followers. These possibilities are
generally downplayed and often completely ignored by Mark’s readers.
Nowhere in the Gospel of Mark is there any indication that Jesus has
’bound’ Satan or Beelzebub. The verb de5 appears nine times in the
text of Mark (3.27; 5.3, 4; 6.17; 11.2, 4; 14.31; 15.1, 7), but never with
Satan or other demonic beings as its object. In addition, unlike Matthew
and Luke, Mark’s account of Jesus’ temptation by Satan ( 1.12-13) is
very sketchy. It is not at all clear that Jesus has in any way defeated or
overcome Satan’s temptations in Mark, unlike Matthew and Luke.
None of Jesus’ statements in Mk 3.23b-26 (’How can Satan drive out
Satan? And if a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot
stand. And if a house is divided against itself, that house will not be
able to stand. And if Satan rises up against himself and is divided, he
cannot stand but comes to an end’) unambiguously rejects the scribes’

charge that Jesus serves the devil. Nor do these words offer unambigu-
ous affirmation of Jesus’ identity. Instead Jesus suggests an uncanny

doubling of Satan/a kingdom/a house as things that ’cannot stand’.

The warning concerning blasphemy against the Holy Spirit (3.29)
that follows the strong man saying may be read as suggesting that Jesus
is possessed, not by Beelzebub, but by God. However, in typical

15. Mt. 27.17 in Codex Coridethianus.

44

Markan fashion, the story never says that Jesus is possessed by God.
This inference is supplied by the reader in order to make sense of the
story, much as the inference that Gregor Samsa is (or is not) psychotic
helps to make sense out of Kafka’s story. As we have already seen, this
desire to decode the story appears to be an inevitable response to the
fantastic, and it is always ideological. The narrator’s comment at Mk
3.30 (’this was because they said he had an unclean spirit’) does not
remove the need for an interpretive decision from the reader. Femando

Belo very interestingly interprets Mk 3.30 as a threat directed at the

reader-that is, to read incorrectly is the unforgivable sin (1981: 118).
However, if this is the case, the threat itself must also be read correctly!
In the versions of this story in Matthew and Luke, Jesus has already
explicitly stated that he drives out demons ’by the spirit of God’ (Mt.
12.28). These explicit statements would not be needed if the comment
at Mk 3.30 (omitted by both Matthew and Luke) had sufficiently
clarified things. ’This was because they said he had an unclean spirit’ is
not at all equivalent to ’this was because his spirit was God’s’. The
statement of the scribes blasphemes against the Holy Spirit only if the
Holy Spirit ’is’ the spirit of Jesus. However, just as the Gospel of Mark
does not make it clear that Jesus is stronger than Beelzebub, so Mark
also does not tell its reader that Jesus’ spirit is the Holy Spirit. Mark’s
If¡
depiction of the baptism of Jesus-when Jesus sees ’the Spirit like a
dove descending upon him’ (1.10)-is another ambiguous text. The
voice from the sky that identifies Jesus as ’my son whom I love’ (Mk
1.11, see also 9.7) is itself not identified, leaving open the possibility
that the scribes may be right: perhaps Jesus is possessed by the devil!
Mark’s inclusion in the Christian canon, safely surrounded by Matthew
and Luke, discourages this reading. Matthew’s and Luke’s accounts of
the baptism make it explicit that the spirit that has come to Jesus is the
Holy Spirit, or Spirit of God (Mt. 3.16, Lk. 3.22).
Furthermore, who is in danger of blasphemy here? ’They said he had
an unclean spirit.’ Are ’they’ the scribes from Jerusalem, as I have just

assumed? The scribes say that Jesus is possessed by Beelzebub. Or are

’they’ ’his own people’? These people say that Jesus is out of his mind.
Both groups seek to control Jesus, to define his identity. Perhaps that is
what counts as blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. The narrator’s

16. The capitalization of this word by Richmond Lattimore, the translator, clari-
fies a very unclear text&mdash;that is, it de-fantasizes a fantastic scene. It is one of several
unliteral moments in a generally ’literal’ translation.
 45

comment at 3.30 conceals as much as it reveals. The fantastic indeter-

minacy of Mark’s larger story is maintained through the intercalation of
these two stories, with their distinct yet overlapping themes of ’posses-
sion’-the (uncanny) family scene played off against the question of
the relation of Jesus to the (marvelous) demons. Neither story clarifies
or resolves the issues presented in the other story, but the two stories

together resonate with one another-they are narrative doubles. This

does not clarify their respective meanings. Instead it confuses them
further. The reader cannot rest content with this lack of clarity. A
decision must be made.

Conclusion

Jesus’ confrontation with the scribes ends at Mk 3.30, and the story
appears to return to a confrontation between Jesus and his family. As
we have already seen, Jesus does not respond to his mother’s and

brothers’ desire to possess him by replying to them that he is already

possessed by God. Instead, he turns to the crowd seated around him.
Has Jesus rejected the supernatural claims of both God and Beelzebub
in favor of the human needs of the crowd? Does the ’answer’ that he
has already given to the scribes-the saying about the strong man and
the threat regarding blasphemy-somehow correspond to the ’answer’
that he gives to his family? In other words, is the strong man (in his
house) to be somehow equated with the demands of one’s own family?
If so, then as I suggested above, not Jesus but rather the crowd should
be identified as the thief who binds the strong man, that is, Jesus.
Conversely, does Jesus’ willingness to have the crowd possess (or bind)
him as son and brother somehow affirm the insinuation that he is
possessed by Beelzebub‘? Or by the Holy Spirit?
The Gospel of Mark does not answer any of these questions, in this
episode or anywhere else in the larger story of that Gospel. If Mark
answered these questions, its generic indeterminacy would come to an
end and its narrative identity would resolve into either the genre of the
marvelous or the genre of the uncanny. In these two interwoven stories
in Mark, both Jesus’ identity and his authority remain undecidable. Is
Jesus human or divine? Does Jesus’ authority come from God or from
the devil? Or does it come from human beings? This question is
explicitly asked in Mk 11.27-33, and Jesus gives an evasive response:
46

And as he walked about in the temple, the high priests and the scribes
and the elders came to him and said: By what authority do you do this?
Or who gave you this authority, to do these things? Jesus said to them: I
will ask you one thing, and you answer me, and I will tell you by what
authority I do this. Was the baptism of John from heaven or from men?
Answer me. They discussed this among themselves, saying: If we say:
From heaven, he will say: Then why did you not believe him? But if we
say: From men-They were afraid of the people, for these all held John
to be truly a prophet. And they answered Jesus and said: We do not
know. And Jesus said to them: Neither will I tell you by what authority I
do these things.

The reader is placed in the position of the scribes and elders. She can
decide one way or the other, but the story will not determine that deci-
sion for her.
In contrast to Mark, the stories in both Matthew and Luke stress that
the kingdom of heaven or God has come ’to/upon you’ in the powerful
actions of Jesus, and in case this is still unclear, their larger narrative
contexts heavily reinforce this interpretation. In both Matthew’s and
Luke’s versions of the encounter with the scribes, the search for a ’spir-
itual’ (marvelous or supernatural) interpretation has been augmented,
and the corresponding possibilities of a ’political’ (uncanny but natural-
istic) reading have been diminished by their explicit association of
Jesus with the spirit or finger of God. Mark 3.27 by itself gives us no
reason to think of the strong man as other than a human being. The

proximity of Jesus’ saying to the words concerning Beelzebub and

Satan suggests this possibility. This is made evident by the parallels
to the strong man saying in the noncanonical Gospel of Thomas. In
Thornns’s saying 35 (see also sayings 21 and 44), Mark’s narrative
context of the dispute about Beelzebub is entirely absent, and there is
no reason to think of the strong man as anything but a human being.
One more transformation of the Gospel of Mark’s text by Matthew
and Luke will be noted here, a small but significant shift. The human
’sons of men’ who need forgiveness in Mk 3.28 disappear and are
replaced by the (divine?) ’son of man’ against whom one might blas-
pheme in Mt. 12.32 and Lk. 12.10. Mk 3.28 is the only verse in any
biblical Gospel that uses the phrase ’son of man’ in this way. Yet as we
have noted above, it is Jesus, the ’son of man’, who is eventually con-
victed of blasphemy. It is Jesus who says to the crowd that he is their
son and brother. Perhaps Matthew and Luke found this suggestion of

solidarity with humanity to be disturbing; in any case, Mark’s written

 47

trace has once again been erased in the parallel versions of the saying.
Commentators also sometimes exclude Mk 3.28 from their lists of ’son
of man’ sayings of Jesus, because he is apparently not speaking about
himself in this saying; likewise, some translations (such as the RSV) do
not capitalize ’sons of men’ in this verse but capitalize ’Son of man’
elsewhere in the Gospels. Typography is also ideological.
The implicit reader of Mk 3.20-35 cannot determine whether this
story is marvelous or uncanny. Because Mark’s story hesitates between
two distinct referential genres, the text of the Gospel of Mark fails to
refer; or better, it refers only to itself. This qualifies it as a fantastic
story. The meaning of the story hinges on the actual reader’s beliefs, or
ideology, but these beliefs must be read into the story. The story in Mk
3.20-35 resists the reader’s beliefs. It does not give the reader sufficient
cues to decode, for example, the referent of hoi par’ autou, much less

the identity of Jesus. This resistance to belief appears in the fantastic

elements of the story-the very elements that are rewritten and de-
fantasized by Matthew and Luke.
The text of Mark here offers an undecidable choice between two
readings of the identity of Jesus, which require two contradictory real-
ities. Instead of referring to a single, consistent world, Mark’s story
refers to a contradiction between worlds and to its own unsuccessful
efforts, as a story, to determine the selection between them. At this
point of fantastic hesitation, the story is most purely fictional, and the
bond between actual reader and implicit reader is most tenuous. The
reader finds herself ’on the outside’, along with Jesus’s family, the
scribes, the crowds, and even the disciples.&dquo;

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aichele, George
1996 Jesus Framed (London: Routledge).
1997a ’Postmodern Fantasy, Ideology, and the Uncanny’, Para*doxa 3/3-4:
498-513.
1997b ’Rewriting Superman’, in George Aichele and Tina Pippin (eds.), The
Monstrous and the Unspeakable (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press).
1998 ’Jesus’s Violence’, in George Aichele and Tina Pippin (eds.), Violence,
Utopia, and the Kingdom of God (London: Routledge).

17. I am indebted to Professor Richard Walsh of Methodist College for his

careful reading and comments on an earlier version of this article.
48

Bachelard, Gaston
1964 The Poetics of Space (trans. Maria Jolas: Boston: Beacon Press).
Belo, Fernando
1981 A MaterialistReading of the Gospel of Mark (trans. Matthew J. O’Con-
nell; Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books).
Cameron, Ron (ed.)
1982 The Other Gospels (Philadelphia: Westminster Press).
de Man, Paul
1979 Allegories of Readirrg (New Haven: Yale University Press).
Derrida, Jacques
1978 Writing and Difference (trans. Alan Bass; Chicago: University of Chicago
Press).
Freud, Sigmund
1955 ’The "Uncanny"’, in Complete Psychological Works. XVII (trans. Alix
Strachey; London: Hogarth Press): 219-56.
Husserl, Edmund
1962 Ideas (trans. W.R. Boyce Gibson: New York: Macmillan).
Johnson. Sherman E.
1960 A Commentary on the Gospel According to St. Mark (London: A. & C.
Black).
Kristeva, Julia
1984 Revolution in Poetic Language (trans. Margaret Waller; New York:
Columbia University Press).
Lattimore, Richmond (trans.)
1979 The Four Gospels and the Revelation (New York: Dorset Press).
Lydenberg, Robin
1997 ’Freud’s Uncanny Narratives’, PMLA 112/5:1072-86.
Nineham. D.E.
1963 Saint Mark (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books).
Rabkin. Eric
1976 The Fantastic in Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press).
Taylor,Vincent
1953 The Gospel According to Saint Mark (London: Macmillan).
Todorov, Tzvetan
1973 The Fantastic (trans. Richard Howard; Cleveland: Case Western Reserve
University Press).
1977 The Poetics of Prose (trans. Richard Howard: Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press).

ABSTRACT

Mk 3.20-35 intercalates two stories about the possession of Jesus. Jesus’ family
(’those about him’) seek to take control of him, thinking him to be insane, while
’scribes from Jerusalem’ accuse him of possession by the devil. I read this double
story in light of Tzvetan Todorov’s theory of the fantastic, Sigmund Freud’s essay,
’The "Uncanny"’, and Jacques Derrida’s essay on ’Freud and the Scene of